The VRC Winter Championship final (1600m) occasionally throws up a good horse for the spring (Sea Battle won it last year) and Heath Conners will be one of the trainers hoping that will be the case again in 2009.

The Conners-trained Davcon has enjoyed a productive winter, tuning up with a midfield finish in the listed Straight Six at Flemington before a victory in the second heat of the Winter Championship, at Cranbourne, a third to Benelli at Sandown and a narrow but impressive last-start win at his favourite track, Moonee Valley.

This Saturday Davcon lines up against a number of other in-form milers in what as usual will be a wide betting race. The Mark Riley-trained Gold Salute is sure to be strongly fancied, for one, and even the versatile part-time jumper Sand Sweeper, an impressive first-up winner in the final heat, will be in contention.

Tony Kneebone is with Gold Salute, and rider Damien Oliver is this week's Winning Post cover boy.

Elsewhere, the Queensland carnival gasps its last with the running of the Queensland Cup at Eagle Farm, while Rosehill again hosts the racing in Sydney and, as usual, they're racing at Morphettville in Adelaide and Belmont in Perth. Winning Post carries full-colour liftout guides for all those meetings, plus the main Saturday provincial cards in Victoria (Vic/SA/WA/Tas edition), NSW (NSW edition) and Queensland (Qld edition), as well as fields, tips, ratings and colours for the other TAB Saturday cards.

Either side of that, Winning Post will have full-colour liftout form for all four TAB cards on Friday and four TAB cards on Sunday, as well as fields for the rest of the racing on Sunday.

Also this week, Bruce Clark is back from Royal Ascot and so is his popular page 3 column. This week, Bruce looks at the proposed AJC-STC merger and its implications for the three Melbourne race clubs. On the same page, Richard Callander will, as usual, be giving you the inside goss on NSW racing and standing up for the rights of the punna.

On page 4, as usual, our readers are fired up across all the big issues, while further back in the book Paul Richards looks at some suggested improvements to Royal Ascot and wonders if they could apply to Australia's big carnivals. And Tony Rickards has a Q&A with veteran Victorian jockey Neville Wilson in Look Who's Talking.

All up, this week's Winning Post is 112 pages of full-colour form, top-class analysis, news, views and fun. Don't miss it at your newsagent from Thursday afternoon in Melbourne and Victorian provincial cities, the crack of dawn Friday elsewhere.